"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Frank here as there were duets. Some even free-soloed the wall, dispensing with all protection. Frank
liked to play it just a little safer than that, but he had climbed here so many times now that sometimes he
rappelled down and free-climbed next to his rope, pretending to himself that he could grab it if he fell.
The few routes available were all chalked and greasy from repeated use. He decided this time to clip
onto the rope with the ascender.

The river and its gorge created a band of open sky that was unusually big for the metropolitan area. This
as much as anything else gave Frank the feeling that he was in a good place: on a wall route, near water,
and open to the sky. Out of the claustrophobia of the great hardwood forest, one of the things about the
East Coast that Frank hated the most. There were times he would have given a finger for the sight of
open land.

Now, as he rappelled down to the small tumble of big boulders at the foot of the cliff, chalked his hands,
and began to climb the fine-grained old schist of the route, he cheered up. He focused on his immediate
surroundings to a degree unimaginable when he was not climbing. It was like the math work, only then he
wasnтАЩt anywhere at all. Here, he was right on these very particular rocks.

This route he had climbed before many times. About a 5.8 or 5.9 at its crux, much easier elsewhere.
Hard to find really hard pitches here, but that didnтАЩt matter. Even climbing up out of a ravine, rather than
up onto a peak, didnтАЩt matter. The constant roar, the spray, those didnтАЩt matter. Only the climbing itself
mattered.

His legs did most of the work. Find the footholds, fit his rock-climbing shoes into cracks or onto knobs,
then look for handholds; and up, and up again, using his hands only for balance, and a kind of tactile
reassurance that he was seeing what he was seeing, that the footholds he was expecting to use would be
enough. Climbing was the bliss of perfect attention, a kind of devotion, or prayer. Or simply a retreat into
the supreme competencies of the primate cerebellum. A lot was conserved.

By now it was evening. A sultry summer evening, sunset near, the air itself going yellow. He topped out
and sat on the rim, feeling the sweat on his face fail to evaporate.
 There was a kayaker, below in the river. A woman, he thought, though she wore a helmet and was
broad-shouldered and flat-chestedтАФhe would have been hard-pressed to say exactly how he knew, and
yet he was sure. This was another savannah competency, and indeed some anthropologists postulated
that this kind of rapid identification of reproductive possibility was what the enlarged neocortex had
grown to do. The brain growing with such evolutionary speed, specifically to get along with the other sex.
A depressing thought given the results so far.

This woman was paddling smoothly upstream, into the hissing water that only around her seemed to be
re-collecting itself as a liquid. Upstream it was a steep rapids, leading to the white smash at the bottom of
the falls proper.

The kayaker pushed up into this wilder section, paddling harder upstream, then held her position against
the flow while she studied the falls ahead. Then she took off hard, attacking a white smooth flow in the
lowest section, a kind of ramp through the smash, up to a terrace in the whitewater. When she reached
the little flat she could rest again, in another slightly more strenuous maintenance paddle, gathering her
strength for the next salmonlike climb.

Abruptly leaving the strange refuge of that flat spot, she attacked another ramp that led up to a bigger
plateau of flat black water, a pool that had an eddy in it, apparently, rolling backward and allowing her to
rest in place. There was no room there to gain any speed for another leap up, so that she appeared to be